Azure Jane Lunatic (Azz) đș (
azurelunatic) wrote2013-07-28 09:26 pm
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"not currently in violation" - what #Twitter really needs to do about its abuse problem
Background: So there's a current up-in-arms regarding really skeevy crap on Twitter. It goes like this:
Someone (often female) says something that gets the attention of abusive asshats.
Abusive asshats (often male) say things on Twitter that are entirely possibly legally actionable.
Their target complains, usually to Twitter, with screenshots and links.
Support volume being what it has to be, it takes a while to get notice.
The abusive asshat cleans up their account in the interim.
Twitter comes back and says that Abusive Asshat's account is "not currently in violation" of Twitter's terms of service.
This is remarkably unhelpful to the person who's been the target of all this abuse.
Now.
I have never been a member of LiveJournal's Abuse Prevention team. I am not a member of Dreamwidth's Terms of Service team. (I am a Dreamwidth spamwhacker, which is a partner department.)
From my experience in conversing with various then-current and former members of LiveJournal's Abuse team, I can say quite firmly that accepting accuser-sourced screenshots of content that is against the Terms of Service of a website is not, and can never be, a form of evidence that can be solely admissable when enacting penalties against an offending account.
Why? Screenshots can be faked.
I am as certain as I can be without having been personally there and witnessed the whole thing go down that 99% of the women on Twitter reporting that jacked-up asshats are promising to enact various forms of appalling violence to them (most of it rapey) have legit complaints. I've seen enough of it happening to know that it's happening and not being exaggerated a large majority of the time. It's got to be against the rules.
But the jackholes in question are sometimes canny enough to make their violations disappear from their Twitter accounts before it gets taken official notice of, and then all Twitter has is the word of the complainant and the screenshot.
There's a technical solution for this, and it's not a "report abuse" button that can be gamed by someone with a huge following on their side.
The technical solution for this is a "preserve and report tweet" button that caches the offending tweet on Twitter's servers, and initiates the reporting process, where the complainant fills out the appropriate forms, making reference to the secured and admissible cached tweet.
After this, no matter if the offender cleans up his account, there is still a record that he said this thing, assuming someone initiated the reporting process. Furthermore, the complainant could be given a Twitter case number to give to law enforcement, and law enforcement could then request testimony from Twitter that the offending tweet was made, in case it's something deserving of criminal or civil charges. The cached copy would remain accessible to Twitter's speaker-to-cops department even after Twitter suspended the account for violations.
Someone (often female) says something that gets the attention of abusive asshats.
Abusive asshats (often male) say things on Twitter that are entirely possibly legally actionable.
Their target complains, usually to Twitter, with screenshots and links.
Support volume being what it has to be, it takes a while to get notice.
The abusive asshat cleans up their account in the interim.
Twitter comes back and says that Abusive Asshat's account is "not currently in violation" of Twitter's terms of service.
This is remarkably unhelpful to the person who's been the target of all this abuse.
Now.
I have never been a member of LiveJournal's Abuse Prevention team. I am not a member of Dreamwidth's Terms of Service team. (I am a Dreamwidth spamwhacker, which is a partner department.)
From my experience in conversing with various then-current and former members of LiveJournal's Abuse team, I can say quite firmly that accepting accuser-sourced screenshots of content that is against the Terms of Service of a website is not, and can never be, a form of evidence that can be solely admissable when enacting penalties against an offending account.
Why? Screenshots can be faked.
I am as certain as I can be without having been personally there and witnessed the whole thing go down that 99% of the women on Twitter reporting that jacked-up asshats are promising to enact various forms of appalling violence to them (most of it rapey) have legit complaints. I've seen enough of it happening to know that it's happening and not being exaggerated a large majority of the time. It's got to be against the rules.
But the jackholes in question are sometimes canny enough to make their violations disappear from their Twitter accounts before it gets taken official notice of, and then all Twitter has is the word of the complainant and the screenshot.
There's a technical solution for this, and it's not a "report abuse" button that can be gamed by someone with a huge following on their side.
The technical solution for this is a "preserve and report tweet" button that caches the offending tweet on Twitter's servers, and initiates the reporting process, where the complainant fills out the appropriate forms, making reference to the secured and admissible cached tweet.
After this, no matter if the offender cleans up his account, there is still a record that he said this thing, assuming someone initiated the reporting process. Furthermore, the complainant could be given a Twitter case number to give to law enforcement, and law enforcement could then request testimony from Twitter that the offending tweet was made, in case it's something deserving of criminal or civil charges. The cached copy would remain accessible to Twitter's speaker-to-cops department even after Twitter suspended the account for violations.
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However, I'm not sure how well a function to preserve user data for abuse prevention purposes would fit within Twitter's Terms of Service and Privacy Policy, as well as various privacy laws (especially in Europe). There doesn't seem to be anything in their TOS that grants or implies an absolute right to delete data, but there's also nothing that grants Twitter the right to indefinitely preserve user data (even the license granted by the user in section 5 isn't irrevocable).
Their privacy policy specifies that you can delete your account (and thus your data) from their servers, but does mention a 30-day delay. It's possible a "preserve for evidence" feature could work with a maximum retention of 30 days or something like that.
Or, of course, they could just rewrite their TOS.
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Data retention. Such a fascinating topic.
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Fake screenshots of tweets are so abundant (especially on Tumblr) it's not even funny. Standard fonts, identical formatting for every tweet, it's not ten minutes of work in any graphic editor.
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Would it be fair to hold people accountable for everything they've said in haste and repented at leisure?
For one, it's already been said, and if it's been complained about, it's had an effect on other people -- is it fair to let someone get off scot-free for saying something really awful if they delete it out of a fear of getting in trouble?
Anything that's both been complained about and found in violation of the rules ought not to have been said in the first place.
The rules should include consequences that acknowledge that a tweet being deleted is, on balance, probably better than it staying up, and account for isolated incidents and first offenses as well as accounting for situations where there's a clear pattern of abuse. "We saw you do that; don't do it again, under any of your accounts" is a legitimate consequence.
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Also, would it be fair to hold people accountable for money they stole from their companies and then paid back? Or if they attacked people physically but didn't leave marks?
If someone commits a legally actionable act then destroys the evidence in a forest when only their victim is watching, is it still legally actionable?
...Yes. Yes, yes it is. And if they just said something stupid and hasty one time, not a pattern of illegal behaviour, that'll come out in the investigation.
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I'd be very surprised if the people they have doing abuse requests have direct access to any of their tech - they probably just get a couple of extra privs to allow them to see locked accounts and flag accounts as suspended. This is a pity, since a more technically-minded abuse team would be able to fish these things out themselves.
In the end, I suspect Twitter just don't care - if there's nothing bad showing when they look, that's sufficient for them to brush it to one side. I wouldn't hold your breath for any meaningful improvement in this area. Apparently part of privacy being dead is that guys get to threaten and abuse women online and that's okay. :o(
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Also, there's the Twitter firehose feed, which several external companies pay for, and which ships off every. single. tweet. for, well, whatever the other company wants to do with it (private accounts possibly excepted). I know that Yahoo search used this for a while to display trending topics and celebrity tweets in their search results. Point being, if they have this available for external access, it's exceedingly unlikely that they haven't built some kind of in-house data warehousing and analysis system using it, or something even more closely tied to the online system.
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In practice, it's impossible to really know without actually working there. Certainly it would be unreasonable to expect a 'click delete and it's instantly gone from everywhere' policy, given Twitter use a bunch of technologies that involve clustering, caching, and eventual consistency, but that's not a meaningful way of preserving the data.
Not everyone who pays for firehose access actually gets the full feed - they discriminate on pricing based on what percentage of the feed you actually get. They also don't seem to offer replay options (that I've seen), and while I'm sure they're doing interesting analytics work on their stored data their legal obligations re: deleted messages wouldn't change.
Here's something that I've not seen discussed, though: the US Library of Congress maintains an archive of all (public) tweets. I suspect this isn't delivered via the firehose, but there's certainly no way they could honour later delete requests. (See: http://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2013/01/update-on-the-twitter-archive-at-the-library-of-congress/)
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Also, I was under the vague impression that the LOC archive was fed by the firehose, but I wouldn't want to say for certain.
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Personally, I think Azz's idea is great.
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Yes export-control and ritualized hate of the designated-enemy-of-the-day is not the same as harassment, but no, not a lot of hope here that it will be used for anything but a let-us-appear-to-be-seen-doing-something tool.
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...oh, wait, this isn't another Suggestions post? But it's such a good idea!
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I had just learned about the late lamented @Anti_Racism_Dog, and googled about it, and turned up this fascinating article by Malcolm Harris from 2012. It contains, as he puts it, four case studies, of which @Anti_Racism_Dog was one. Far more interesting to me was the one about his prosecution: Now I found this fascinating, and looked further into this case. I found at one point a tweet from before the article, from some random dude mocking Harris that Twitter wasn't going to go to the mat for him. But that is exactly what Twitter did. Twitter only finally complied with the subpoena after quite the court battle.
This is in accord with the characterization of Twitter in this Reason article: I recommend reading the whole article.
I don't think you're going to get this, because I don't think Twitter is interested in enforcing any more of its ToS than it absolutely has to, for a gun-to-the-head definition of "has to". More than merely not interested, actively opposed as a matter of both moral principle and business plan.
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